Book of the Week: 'Land of Hope'
In Land of Hope: An Invitation to the Great American Story, Wilfred M. McClay has produced an inspiring exploration of America’s past that is out of step with the fashionably fractured narratives...
Protesters have been flooding the streets of San Juan, P.R., for more than a week to demand Gov. Ricardo A. Rosselló's... Read More
Last week, the Ritz-Carlton in Washington played host to a much-hyped conference devoted to “national conservatism.” Hosted by... Read More
In an annual rite of late spring, I chide the affable minister of my wife's Presbyterian church for the congregation's singing of “The... Read More
Despite his iconic silence in oral arguments, Clarence Thomas is not the least-known justice to sit on the Supreme Court in recent years.... Read More
Marxism and Buddhism might not seem to have much in common. The former is a materialist socioeconomic theory conceived by a 19th-century... Read More
A literary publishing house is a strange beast—a business, yes, but also less and more than one. Publishers sometimes develop exalted... Read More
In April 1649, just three months after the execution of Charles I and the establishment of the Commonwealth, the first English translation of... Read More
The serial killer's Achilles' heel is the very thing that makes him so fascinating: His urge to repeat himself. He either stages his murders... Read More
Did the English Romantic poet John Keats steal bodies from graves? A closer look at some of the 19th-Century writer's most revered works,... Read More
Herman Melville seems to have got the idea to write a novel about a mad hunt for a fearsome whale during an ocean voyage, but he wrote most... Read More
We live like kings these days, even while we bemoan our state like beggars. Generally speaking, the members of the American middle class... Read More
The hour would appear to be right for the resurrection of Nelson Algren (1909–1981), who had been Chicago's premier novelist several... Read More
Americans opt for unexciting suburban life. The English idealize their culturally desolate countryside. True Europeans prefer... Read More
Seventy years ago, an explosion in a far-flung corner of Soviet-ruled Kazakhstan set off an arms race that took the world to the brink of... Read More
Hiram Coombs Whitley, the chief of the U.S. Secret Service under President Ulysses S. Grant, was brave and public-service-minded,... Read More
Toward the end of “Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language,” the linguist Gretchen McCulloch acknowledges a... Read More
William Giraldi, author of the critical prose collected in American Audacity: In Defense of Literary Daring, is that rarest of... Read More
In April 1949, the poet Pablo Neruda strolled onstage at the First World Congress of Partisans for Peace, in Paris, and apologized... Read More
When I was in graduate school, I had the good fortune to hear Eric Hobsbawm lecture on nationalism. The year was 1992. Hobsbawm had just published his widely read and sharply debated book on the theme, and in the aftermath of the implosion in communist Central and Eastern Europe and the revival of the so-called captive nations, everyone wanted to hear his take on the subject. Hobsbawm's talk was p Read More
Perhaps the greatest irony of the road trip, what Escalante's Dream author David Roberts calls "that quintessentially American concoction," is the façade of structure.Weight-bearing or purely ornamental, nearly all of the classic road trip narratives establish a framework for the journey. As John Steinbeck writes in Travels with Charley, "When the virus of restlessness begins Read More
For a total of ten months spread over fifteen years, Jane Austen visited her brother Edward Austen Knight at his Kent estate. The brimming bookshelves at Godmersham Park were a particular draw for the novelist. During one stay in 1813—which would turn out to be her last—she wrote to her sister, “I am now alone in the Library, Mistress of all I survey.”But which bo Read More
In Land of Hope: An Invitation to the Great American Story, Wilfred M. McClay has produced an inspiring exploration of America’s past that is out of step with the fashionably fractured narratives...
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